Nature Notes - Dogsitting

When I agreed to dog-sit my sister’s sprocker (springer/cocker cross) and springer, my first action was to scour the web for gundog training aids.  The dogs are, it’s fair to say, unrivalled as treat-seeking furry missiles but I wanted to see whaat they could do with something aa bit more interesting than a distressed tennis ball.

There are many gundog training aids, from realistic looking stuffed birds to the basic bean bags that I went for.  The bean bag is designed to let your dog learn how to carry a bird without ripping it to bloody feathery shreds and it’s fair to say that they were something of a hit.  Essentially they are nylon socks that are incredibly robust, with a lanyard at one end.  This allows the owner to pick up what very quickly becomes a muddy, drooly training aid, give it a couple of twirls and then slingshot it across the field with an over-excited dog in hot pursuit.  Repeat until your arm falls off.

The only moment when I questioned whether the bean bag was a good idea was when, after a particularly hearty throw, neither I nor the dogs could find the damn thing.  It was eventually discovered hanging from a tree branch.  Obviously, if it had had a treat sewn into the lining, the dogs would have been on it in an instant.

It’s not that they are greedy, although they can sometimes appear to emulate Greyfriar’s Bobby in their unswerving devotion to sitting beside the kitchen cupboard where their treats are kept (much in the same way that I will linger near a beer fridge), but they are proof positive that food can be used as a training aid.  In this case, they have both learned where the smacko’s are kept.

The golden rule of throwing the dummy was never to toss it anywhere where you couldn’t see it land.  The dogs are tenacious in their pursuit of the dummies and won’t let small things like ponds, or sudden drops , put them off.

There is an art to throwing the dummy, and an art to getting the damn thing off of the dogs once they have retrieved it.  This involves just the right amount of cajoling and shouting and, if all else fails, bribing them with a treat.

Now all I need to find is a fluorescent pheasant and the dogs will be ready for action.  With advances in GM food being made the way they are, I’m confident I won’t have long to wait.

Nature Notes - Catquisition

‘Catnapping’ is such an ugly, emotive word, don’t you think?  That’s why what happened over the bank holiday weekend can much better be described as ‘catquisition’. 

Simply put, we seem to have acquired a cat.  Over the past few weeks we had noticed that the neighbour’s cat was asleep on the roof of our shed, then on the garden furniture.  How it crept steadily closer to the house like some sort of amazingly lazy stop-motion amble I’m not sure, because prior to this weekend I had never seen the thing awake, never mind moving.  Then at the weekend I was walking through the kitchen, stepped over the sleeping cat, got myself a drink and walked out again, once more stepping over the cat.  The cat, it would appear, had decided that the back door being open was an invitation to spend some time out of the hot sun sprawled on a cool kitchen floor.

The morality of this is quite straightforward, it is obviously wrong to steal somebody else’s’ cat.  But is it wrong to, well, offer them a bowl of water on a hot day?  The golden rule was that we would never ever feed the cat.  That evening, we were explaining to our guests round a crowded dinner table over the traditional blackened meat barbeque feast why there was a cat perched next to one of their children, being stroked and purring like an exceptionally contented outdoor motor.  Wine flowed and conversation progressed, the cat, as cats do, wandered around a bit, circulating.  We were explaining the golden rule when one of the guests, who had been bending over in his chair, straightened up with something of a guilty expression, and half a sausage in his hand.

I freely admit that until this point, most of my knowledge of cats came from Tom & Jerry cartoons so, sure, keep them away from frying-pan wielding mice, bulldogs and sassy black maids with brooms, but now that the cat had tasted free range pork sausage, I thought I had better learn a bit more, starting with are cats allergic to free range pork sausage. In case you are wondering, they are not, although they do get very agitated if you try and take their free range pork sausage away from them, but then so do I.  

Tibbles ahoy!

Like farting scooterboys and discreet alcoholism, one of the features of suburban life is the feline felon poster. One sees these sad little adverts pinned on trees, announcing that a cat is missing, giving details and a picture. Once I saw a poster for a missing tortoise and was so struck by the sense of adventure the thing must have had that when I got home I was stirred to make a quick survey of the garden.

A couple of months ago the stakes were raised with a mailshot advertising a missing cat, with a picture. Cats never take good pictures. They always have that sly look that makes it hard to guess what they are thinking, although it’s a sure bet it’s either ‘I am about to lick my anus’, ‘I bet you can’t guess which of your shoes I’ve pooped in’, ‘I have nothing but contempt for you’, or simply ‘I am actually a demon from hell in cat form. And I’ve pooped in your shoe.’

Underneath was a mobile ‘phone number to ring if you spotted Mr Tibbles. I thought little of it; the cat had probably either been kidnapped by vivisectionists or was currently adorning the front bumper of a car like a very surprised Garfield doll. I put the poster down with the absent thought that I would send some crank text messages to the mobile while I was drunk and thought no more of it.

Normally, wild visitors to the Macnabbs estate are few. There are nocturnal foxes and during the day there are the plumpest pigeons to be found outside the pages of children’s books. So when I saw a cat skulking around, I remembered the poster. The problem with cats is that they all look alike and the damn thing was always gone before I could make a positive ID or pump up the pressure on the super-soaker.

The other day, there was a break in the clouds and the rain stopped for a short while. This called for a sacrifice of the choicest cuts of meat to the weather gods and so I fired up the barbeque.

One of the many great things about barbequing is that the barbeque grill is one of the few cooking surfaces that is not so much cleaned as occasionally scraped off. This is because the first thing you cook when you fire up a barbeque is the bacteria that have managed to get a foothold there since the last time you cooked. This means that my barbeque, when heated, smells of the ghosts of feasts past. Mainly chicken and fish.

Which is probably what attracted Mr Tibbles. Returning to the barbeque to see if it was ready to cook on yet (gauged by the amount of smoke coming off it – boy scouts camp fire level for fish, Vatican scale for chicken and ‘oh my Christ evacuate the town the chemical works is alight!’ for meat) I saw Mr Tibbles himself taking a close interest. Fearing that I was about to see the phrase ‘scalded cat’ brought to life in front of me, I shooed him off and made the call. ‘Have you got your cat back’?

It turns out that Mr Tibbles has been leading a double life. His owner explained that he was dividing his time between her and another family a dozen or so houses along and that my back garden was part of his cat parcourt route between houses. The owner spoke as one betrayed. I gathered from our short conversation that Mr Tibbles had had quite a lot of money spent on him at the vets and was on a strict macrobiotic diet at home. This is probably what drove him to a life of being tickled and living off tasty kitchen scraps down the road. It appeared that the two families now operated a sort of cat-share but I got the impression the owner was confident that her approach to cat rearing was going to win the permanent affection of Mr Tibbles.

Unlikely, from the way he was sniffing my chicken scented smoke, I’d say that cat has not ruled out the possibility of three dinners a day.